Nocturnal Emissions (21 page)

“Can’t you…can’t you pump in that fluid again?” Morrow asked.

“Replace the broken wall?”

“We are investigating that possibility,” the man in purple assured her, laying a hand gently on the black-garbed man’s arm. “We have sent men to look at the pumps that bring in the water from the sea.”

“They’ll be rusted. Ruined,” snarled the angry man. “Have you looked about you, Citrin? We have been asleep for
centuries!
”

“Do not give up hope, dear Captain. And if it is indeed fated that we perish, then that is the will of the Pod.”

“It is not
my
will!” the black-garbed man shouted, jerking away from Citrin, and storming off down the beautiful hallway.

“Come.” Citrin extended a hand to Morrow. “We will clothe you, accom-modate you…then you can tell us about your world. Perhaps you can even help us…”

“How can you treat these invaders as guests?” protested a woman in a scarlet gown. “They killed Tondriau!” She pointed at Golding’s stout body.

“And brought about the death of the other two!”

“
We
brought about their deaths, in our frenzy,” another woman countered.

“Our cruder natures overwhelmed us. Now we are fully ourselves, fully composed again. We should lay the fault for these deaths at our own feet.”

“It is an act of the Pod,” said a man all in violet. “These people did not intend to harm us. Did you, my friends?”

The trio of jumpers could not form an answer, dazed as they took in this debate.

“It is Fate, the will of the Pod, that we rot and die,” a woman all in satiny pink sighed wistfully. “Frankly, I grow weary of being alive.”

- Six: Reflections -

“You realize that we’ll never get home, now,” Kubin said to Morrow, watching as she lightly touched the edges of her high, piled wig in the mirror.

“Even if we can repair our suits, how do we will our consciousness back into them? And what about our minds, back home? Have they stopped? Are they still projecting themselves here…but into these biological machines, instead?”

Unconsciously, his eyes trailed down her back, where it was exposed by the low edge of her satiny white bodice. He recalled now how in the dining hall a dark patch of hair had shown below the pale smoothness of her belly…but he had not as yet seen the face behind her mask.

In the mirror, Morrow saw his eyes dip down then back up again. She turned to face him. Her full lips, which had been freshly rouged for her by the servants who had dressed her, smiled faintly. “It’s only fair, I suppose, after what we’ve done to them.”

“You’re as fatalistic as they are.”

“They’re right. Unless they can pump in that sea water, or whatever it is, again…they’ll all decompose while they’re still alive. Become like those zombies, at best.”

“Why?”

“It’s their environment. One of the servants told me. It was poisoned—polluted, it sounds like—over time. Whole cities died. Cities like this building we’re in. But these people had money. They could afford to protect themselves…until a better day could come.”

“And the zombies, those guards, were supposed to release them if it ever did.”“Yes. But that time never came. This world is still poisoned. And now their decay is finally catching up with them.”

Kubin turned to glance around this tiny, compartmentalized room within the vaster room that was the wall-building. It was like a beautifully decorated cell, one of many stacked in a honeycomb, accessed by ladders or staircases, on the level above the immense ballroom that had been flooded.

Without being preserved by the sea, the wallpaper here was stained and sagging, cobwebs had had to be swept away, but it was still better preserved than the portion of the great structure they had initially entered. A small window looked out beyond the wall-city, away from the sea, toward bare-looking hills hunkered dark in the perpetual gray twilight, like dead whales heaped up on a beach.

“So they decided to throw a big farewell party, huh?” Kubin said. “While they let in the sea?”

“It looks like it.”

“Have you seen any children?”

Morrow looked at him, fingering a black velvet ribbon around her slender pale throat. “No. I guess none lived in this building. Or weren’t invited to the party.”

“I wish I had a better sense of these people’s morality,” Kubin muttered, now looking in the mirror himself, at his own masked face. Oddly, he was reluctant to remove the mask in front of Morrow. It seemed like an improper thing to do. Was there some vestige of this body’s former inhabitant still lingering like cobwebs in the corners of its skull? How else could he understand and speak the native tongue?

“I’d say it varies per individual. As it does in our own people.”

“I just want to be sure we’re safe. Now that we have flesh and blood bodies here.” Kubin faced her, tapping the subtle pink line which was all that remained of the wound there. “I don’t want this body to die a second time.”

“But it will,” Morrow said, smiling faintly again. “It’s already dying.”

With that, she removed her mask. The heart-shaped face beneath was striking in its beauty. The eyes were large and dark, commanding, accented by thick arched brows. The mouth small but moistly full. Kubin was ashamed, oddly—as if she had exposed her dainty breasts to him, as they had been exposed in the banquet hall.

Despite Morrow’s stolen youthful beauty, there was a yellow and purple bruise on her cheek near one ear. She fingered the tender patch.

“We’re going to rot, too, Kay,” she told him. Fatalistically.

He took an involuntary step toward her, as if to touch her cheek as well.

“But…how can this happen to us? How come we could repair these ruined dead bodies, only to start rotting?”

“I don’t pretend to understand their physiology, Kay. When we initially entered the bodies, I suppose our life force or however you might categorize it…our souls if you want…”

“I don’t want,” he interrupted.

“Well, whatever it was, it fed and repaired the bodies. But now that we’re settled into them…I think they’re going to break down. Just like the bodies of all the other citizens. Apparently not at the same rate. But it seems inevitable.”

“We have to try to help them get that pump working again,” he muttered.

“Do you suggest we entomb ourselves with them?”

“If that’s what we have to do. Until help can arrive some day.

Others…who might be better equipped to handle this situation than we are.”

“Let’s find Gee, then. And look at those pumps.”

Nodding grimly, Kubin went to hold the door to her tiny assigned apartment open for her. It had been the room of the woman who had been crushed.

Lilin, her name had been. Dark hairs from her head, faded through time, were still snagged in a brush on her miniature vanity.

Her wide snowy skirts rustling, Morrow swept past him out the narrow door. In her wake, Kubin found himself deeply inhaling the perfumes and powders the servants had spread across her glowing white flesh.

- Seven: The Underworld -

Citrin, who was the leader of these people—the “Master of the Manor”, as he described himself—led them himself to the pump.

“The pump filters out the ocean’s impurities,” he explained along the way,

“letting in only its purified essence. I have sent parties of servants out gathering sea water in buckets, so that they can filter out the impurities on a smaller scale…that we might drink this elixir and stave off our decomposition as long as we may.”

They had ventured into a more decayed section of the manor, again with an impossibly high ceiling and with carbonized sand drifted in dunes across the cobblestones, having blown in through broken windows whose shutters had fallen with time. Ultimately, carrying a lantern containing some of that burning resin, he led them to a metal door. It squealed painfully on rusted hinges. Beyond its black threshold, equally corroded metal steps led down into a deep subterranean level. The trio of explorers followed him, their shoes ringing on the steps, which they ardently hoped would not crumble to rust beneath them.

Kubin and Golding carried lanterns as well, the former now dressed entirely in white, the latter in a handsome deep blue.

“We must be on our guard,” said Citrin, who gripped a heavy flintlock in his left hand. “The local fauna, much deformed by poisons and by time, has found its way into these lower regions, I’ve been informed.”

The newcomers had not yet, themselves, been trusted with firearms or swords. The guns from their dismantled suits had been confiscated.

“These are not our original bodies, you know,” Citrin told them, as they descended the last of the stairs to the basement level. Its walls were just as narrow as those above, though they were composed of mortared brick, shrouded in sooty web festooned with spider carcasses. Because they had descended so far, the ceiling was again lost in darkness high above. It was damp, and their voices echoed hollowly. “Our own scientists brought these bodies here from some other place, perhaps from your own place, many many years ago. But their arcane knowledge is lost to time, I fear.”

“What were your former bodies like?”

“I don’t know. None of us know. We obliterated the memory of our former bodies, so as to identify with our new forms. To think of them as our own. We don’t even recall what these earlier forms called themselves. We call ourselves the Masque.”

“Why abandon the earlier bodies?” asked Golding.

“Because they were rotting, just as these bodies are rotting. It is inescapable, so it would seem. Our Destiny, one would say.”

“Well, why not delay Destiny if we can?” said Kubin. “Where is that pump?”

“This way.” Citrin led them again, his lamp held at the length of his arm.

They had only taken a dozen steps when Golding halted and whispered,

“What’s that?”

There was a dry, wispy chittering sound from the shadowy void above them, soaring indefinitely in the limited glow of their guttering lanterns.

Like a huge albino spider, or lizard, or some
thing in between, a bleached
skeletal form scuttled head-first down the wall, into the wavering lantern glow. It stopped abruptly, its bony fingers and toes gripping the bricks, and lifted its face to them—hissing. The nude, emaciated body was like that of a starved child, the oversized head hairless and skull-like. The creature’s eyes were huge and entirely pink, but covered in a translucent membrane. Its teeth, set in lipless gums, were combs of needles.

It bunched its scrawny muscles, in what looked like the prelude to a leap.

Citrin raised his pistol and fired its single, heavy ball. The enclosing walls roared with the discharge, stabbing the party’s ears. For a moment, they couldn’t see the creature through the cloud of smoke, but as it dispersed, they saw the creature lying on its back on the flagstoned floor…jerking in dying convulsions, a sap-thick white fluid oozing out of one punctured and collapsed eye.

“Was that one of the local fauna?” Morrow gasped.

“In a way. It was one of our people…a
descendant
of one of our people.

One of those who did not escape the poisons, but still managed to survive and adapt. In a corrupted form.”

“God,” Kubin breathed, staring down at the finally still, ghastly being. It was oddly pathetic, despite its obvious savage intent.

“More or less the living dead, like our poor devoted guards,” Citrin said, as he loaded a new ball into his flintlock.

They continued on past the corpse, which had curled up upon itself like one of the countless spider husks.

There were thick pipes that now ran along the walls, caked in rust and patched here and there with rags or bolted plates. “We’re close,” said Citrin, removing his hat to brush away some webs he had accumulated. “This equipment was built in part with a few last dregs of knowledge remaining from our lost science.”

Morrow pointed to three large circles etched into the wall, arranged in a kind of pyramid. “What is this?”